Monthly Archives: March 2015

Blessed Are The Burgerflippers

By Myron Robert Pauli

So I see that Portland OR has raised the minimum wage to $15/hour and the rest of the state may soon follow.

Years back, I did some minimum wage work at a chemical-spectroscopy lab in New York – not particularly lucrative or enjoyable but it paid money. The company mostly hired college graduates from the Philippines (probably with some H-1 visa) because they were cheap. Not surprisingly, companies pay workers at little as they can get away with. Workers, in turn, are right to grumble and are free to seek out higher paying work (or at least better conditions – that lab was rather unsafe). Most people do not work for some great satisfaction – most jobs range from somewhat stinky to complete stinky. Who the hell wants to pick crops in the hot summer or climb up cleaning gutters in winter? Workers primarily work for one primary motivation – money.

The $15 minimum wage will be a boon to developers of automated burger-flippers. Not only do they not get the $15, the robots don’t need Social Security, W-2 forms, OSHA inspectors, Obomney-Rombama care, paid vacations, sick leave, and those other things that raise “overheads.”

Anyone who has studied the history of labor in the 19th or 20th Century should be aware of the Luddites who went around smashing machinery. I would not be surprised if some restaurants not only take reservations online but orders as well – press the steak icon and it will ask rare through well-done. This should not be too hard to code and people can pick up their orders cafeteria style. Or a robot can probably deliver the gourmet food to the table. The chef can be well paid, but who goes to the restaurant for the waitresses (excepting, perhaps, Hooters)? Four star pre-ordered robot delivered gourmet meals with profits shared between consumer and restauranteur.

However, let me put on my Samuel Gompers hat when it comes to the anti-worker rant of Jennifer Harris. First of all, workers have every right to be greedy and should be free to strike (but not destroy property or resort to violence) – with the flip side that the employer can find replacements. If I choose to “refuse” to be locker-room attendant for the Russian Women’s Volleyball Team for less than $1500 an hour, perhaps the team owner can find someone who will work for less pay!

The second point of Harris’ rant is how the troops are “getting shot at, deploying for months in hostile environments, and putting their collective asses on the line every day protecting your unskilled butt?” The first part about being shot in hostile environments is perfectly true. As to the second part: How are these “troops” protecting the butt of anyone, skilled or unskilled, other than the military brass and politicians who sent them in to be 21st Century IED-fodder? I know what benefits I get from the grocery clerk and the restaurant waiter and the guy who cleans my gutters. (Or from Edward Snowden.) Does the average American get protected when some troops “engage” Sunnis who are shooting at Shiites or Shiites who are shooting at Sunnis? Harris makes fun of “Sally McBurgerflipper” and “Johnny Fry-Boy,” but they enable Mom to save a day of cooking and let the brats play at the McSlides. What great “service” did anyone get out of Petraeus and that neo-con phony “surge,” other than some titillation concerning lover Paula Broadwell? Yet, “conservatives” deify Petraeus and sneer at the gardener.

In that sense, I can neither endorse the leftist desire to ignore the realities of labor markets, nor these rightists who extol senseless, pointless, endless killing over honest backbreaking work. Maybe the poor schlub mowing your lawn will motivate his kids to get a real education (not modern “liberal arts”), and that kid might invent a new “smart lawnmower.” Anyway, the poor shlub is doing honest work.

Blessed are the Burgerflippers – may they profit both themselves, their employers, and their customers for they are the Children of Peace.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATED: More Race Ridiculousness (Borat Had Better Be Careful)

Communism, Free Speech, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

Within the first year of the Red Terror reign, the Bolsheviks instituted a list of categories of subversives who would be made “a head shorter” in Trotsky’s “charming” expression, if caught talking out of turn or simply being who they were—kulaks, priests, White Guards, socialists, Mensheviks, peasants with a bad attitude, bourgeoisie, on and on. “Counterrevolutionary” speech could certainly make a man “a head shorter.”

While the cultural Marxism under which we labor today does not yet demand a man’s head—we don’t shoot, beat, drown, behead and starve people, as did the Bolsheviks–America’s Orwellian Ministries of Truth will strip the offending individual of everything he has.

Parker Rice’s life is just about ruined because he sang a nasty song while white. That’s all. Rice, who is “one of the two University of Oklahoma students expelled for their role in leading a racist chant,” did not defraud, steal, vandalize, beat, rape or murder anyone. He merely mouthed some ugly lyrics. Contrary to what university President David Boren claimed, Rice did not “threaten” anyone with his “racist behavior.” He just did a nine-second unfunny Borat number (as in “Throw the Jew down the well“).

In this Orwellian world, words speak louder than actions. A silly ditty, sung by drunken white youths, has elicited the unusual hysteria: “the university and the fraternity’s national chapter acted swiftly to shutter the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house. … the Greek letters sigma, alpha and epsilon have been removed from the frat house’s facade, the house will be closed as of midnight Tuesday and the university will board up the windows. …”

What next? Fumigation? Exorcism? The tearing of clothes? The rubbing of earth and ashes on the head? Dressing in sackcloth?

Close: prayer vigils, lamentation, marches … Read on and have a brown bag handy.

UPDATED (3/11): Borat Had Better Be Careful.

In case there was any doubt, we love “throw the Jew down the well,” by Sasha Baron Cohen, alias Borat. Genius.

See “Fun in Kazakhstan.”

Britain’s Best Bitch Flouts ‘The Tyranny Of Nice’*

Britain, Celebrity, Feminism, Healthcare, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

Katie Hopkins: “I’m a woman of my convictions, I’ll say what I like and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen.” “I went to a convent. The sisters there said to never use the word nice, because it’s the worst word in the English language. I tend to agree.”

So do I.

Britain’s best bitch has gotten into trouble with the PC brigade in the US, too, for quipping that singer “Kelly Clarkson does look a bit like she ate her backing singers,” and that, during pregnancy, when “she took [up] eating for two … she decided to eat for 10.” And, “If you can’t find the fun in that, then more pity on you.”

“That’s not bullying,” laughed Hopkins at the Access Hollywood dumbfounded (and dumb) duo,”That’s a great line.”

Agreed (maybe not great, but certainly funny).

Hopkins added that “it’s her responsibility as a woman to tell others to get off their [vast] asses and stop costing her money (through the UK’s NHS, the socialized healthcare system, where, as with Obamacare, the healthy subsidize the unhealthy).

Viva Katie Hopkins for flouting “the tyranny of nice” (also a book by Kathy Shaidle).

UPDATED: The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

If, as TAWE (The Ass With Ears) would have it, and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”—then, by logical extension, the Civil Rights Movement was spawned by not much at all. Since we know this to be untrue, what do you suppose is missing from the Ferguson report, according to which there exists “‘a pattern or practice of’ racial bias in both policing and the court system, searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and interference with the free expression rights of all peaceful protesters”?

“African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” the report asserts.

Here’s what’s going on: To advance propaganda, pseudoscience must be deployed. After all, the Idiocracy will be none the wiser. Yes, black are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement than whites. But the Ferguson report fails to control for the fact that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters).

Via InvestorsBusinessDaily:

“The Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, explains that differences in traffic stops can simply be attributed to ‘differences in offending.'”

But federal data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that blacks violate traffic laws at higher rates than whites in every offense, including driving with an invalid license.
Yet Holder makes it sound as if Ferguson police target blacks at random for stops for no other reason than “driving while black,” and then pile on the tickets. …

It is one thing to demand that traffic and other laws be repealed because blacks are more likely to fall foul of them. (I certainly think drug laws should be repealed together with all unjust laws, irrespective.) But it is quite another thing to shout racism when blacks are stopped more frequently, because cops are obliged to enforce laws against offenders. People are sick of it.

UPDATE: The brilliant Heather Mac Donald on “The Disparate Impact Gambit”:

… Disparate-impact analysis obviates the need to find intentional discrimination in a civil-rights case; a policy or practice can be wholly color-blind, but if, in its application, it falls more heavily on a particular racial group, it is illegal under certain federal regulations. A job requirement that employees have a high-school degree is a classic example of a policy that has a disparate impact, if the high-school-degree requirement disqualifies more blacks than whites for the job. Never mind that the employer applies his job threshold without racial bias, he can be held liable for racial discrimination anyway if he is unable to justify the high-school requirement as a business necessity.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of disparate-impact theory against schools for their disciplinary practices has been a disaster for classroom safety and order. That school-discipline crusade has meant that schools cannot remove unruly black students from the classroom under neutral behavioral codes without triggering potential legal liability, simply because more black students violate those codes. But as destructive as the application of disparate-impact theory to school authority has been, applying it broadly to law enforcement is a recipe for anarchy. There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate.

MORE Mac Donald.